Four years ago, the International Astronomical Union organized a competition to give popular names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets that orbit them. The event encouraged 570,000 people to vote and the iconic planet 51 Pegasi b became "Dimidium, " 55 Cancri b became "Galileo," and (among others) Formalhaut b became "Dagon." It remains unclear …
Continue reading "A Grand Global Competition to Name 100 ExoWorlds"
The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,” began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system. With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search …
I regret that I haven't been able to file Many Worlds posts for a while, but here is why: The broken part of my wife's ankle is the traingle of bone floating near the tibia, to which it should be attached. She's had surgery and isn't supposed to be walking on it for a …
The question of whether simple life can survive in space is hardly new, but it has lately taken on a new urgency. It is not only a pressing scientific question -- might life from Mars or another body have seeded life on Earth? Might organisms similar to extreme Earth life survive Mars-like conditions? -- but …
CubeSats are the anti-big ticket space missions. They come as small as 4 inches squared and in units that size weigh about 3 pounds. They currently carry cameras, high gain antennas, radios and other scientific equipment, and because of their weight and size they can easily hitch a ride on a rocket sending …
As you may have noticed, there haven't been Many Worlds columns of late. The reason, as you can no doubt guess, is that the column is supported to some extent by NASA, and the agency is caught in the government shutdown. So I have gotten a STOP WORK order and will not be …
The very first planet detected outside our solar system powerfully made clear that our prior understanding of what planets and solar systems could be like was sorely mistaken. 51 Pegasi was a Jupiter-like massive gas planet, but it was burning hot rather than freezing cold because it orbited close to its host star -- circling …
The Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live the Kepler. NASA officials announced on Tuesday that the pioneering exoplanet survey telescope -- which had led to the identification of almost 2,700 exoplanets -- had finally reached its end, having essentially run out of fuel. This is after nine years of observing, after a malfunctioning …
Continue reading "The Kepler Space Telescope Mission Is Ending But Its Legacy Will Keep Growing."
Here's an image to fire your imagination: Fifteen thousand galaxies in one picture -- sources of light detectable today that were generated as much as 11 billion years ago. Of those 15,000 galaxies, some 12,000 are inferred to be in the process of forming stars. That's hardly surprising because the period around 11 billions years …
What does NASA's drive to return to the moon have to do with worlds of exoplanets and astrobiology that are generally discussed here? The answer is actually quite a lot. Not so much about the science, although current NASA plans would certainly make possible some very interesting science regarding humans living in deep space, as …
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